Today's manufacturing schemes for consumer products must run very efficiently and at high speed in order to economically enable the manufacturer to provide products to the market at competitive prices. This is particularly true for consumer goods such as packaged foods, cleaning products, and paper goods.
Operating at typical speeds, these manufacturing schemes can produce and package hundreds of items per minute. These individual product packages must then be configured in the packaging section of the manufacturing scheme into arrangements for desirable assortment as well as efficient and economical shipping to the marketplace. These shipping containers vary from sealed, corrugated cartons holding a pre-determined number of individual packages to corrugated trays with poly wrapping to stretch-wrapped, multi-layer bundles designed to be placed on pallets.
Because of the need for high-speed operations, the typical limitation of an automated packaging operation is that it is designed to produce a very limited number of packaging arrangements. In order for a manufacturing line to have the flexibility to arrange product packages in multiple shipping arrangements, several, separate packing operations are required and must all be connected to the manufacturing line for efficient operations. A change in product package grouping (e.g. 12 bottles per carton to 4 bottles per carton) often requires a complicated, timely mechanical change to the packaging section which necessitates the manufacturing operation being stopped.
This manufacturing requirement for inflexible package groupings runs contrary to the increasing demands for product grouping flexibility from the marketplace. For instance, club stores often require products to be bundled into packets of two or more individual product packages. Likewise, special sales promotions may require that two similar or dissimilar products be bundled and shipped together for a limited period of time.
Currently, these special packing requirements are satisfied by costly, manual operations. As such, there is a need for an automated, highly-flexible packing operation which can quickly assemble special packing arrangements without disrupting ongoing manufacturing operations.